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Re:The Devil Is in the Details of Project Verify’s Goal to E... by LinuxBender on Thursday October 04, 2018 @01:38PM (#18141939)
Client certs have existed for a long time. Most sites won't implement them without great demand from the user-base or specific security needs. This would also mean that sites would have to track all of your client certs from each device.

The upside would be that you could tie a cert to a specific hardware device and serial number, which means someone getting your certs won't be useful to them. Microsoft does something like this for xbox "machine" accounts. Each device can have it's own password that is tied to that serial number. If leaked, the password (or cert in this case) is not useful anywhere else. This is similar in concept to tieing an ssh public key to a specific network or IP address, except it is a hardware identifier in this case.

Unpopular opinion disclaimer: Anything else pretty much requires tieing into some 3rd party auth service or hardware token which have their own issues, such as vendor lock-in, managing server side libraries, leaking usage data to 3rd party providers, creating weak-chain back-doors to 3rd party vendors, privacy violations, etc.. I know those are all the rage right now among technical folk, but the general public adoption is quite low. Passwords will be around for a very long time.

Re:The Devil Is in the Details of Project Verify’s Goal to E... by rkeene2 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @05:27PM (#18143827)
This is used heavily in USG/DOD where everyone has a certificate thanks to HSPD-12
Re:The Devil Is in the Details of Project Verify’s Goal to E... by LinuxBender on Thursday October 04, 2018 @06:03PM (#18144073)
I would fully expect some government sites to require client certs. Some DNS registrars also required client certs in addition to 2FA. Some payment systems also require them in addition to IP restrictions.
Re:The Devil Is in the Details of Project Verify’s Goal to E... by rkeene2 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @06:18PM (#18144177)
HSPD-12 largely abolished passwords as authenticators throughout the executive branch.
Re:The Devil Is in the Details of Project Verify’s Goal to E... by LinuxBender on Friday October 05, 2018 @11:01AM (#18148667)
Hopefully all of their authentication methods are hosted in-house, on-prem and not outsourced or outside of secure boundaries. Everything has a back-door these days and leaks like a waterfall. :-)
Re:The Devil Is in the Details of Project Verify’s Goal to E... by rkeene2 on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @01:54PM (#18178232)
A lot of the authentication is TLS client certificate authentication, SAML hosted by internal SAML IdP systems (such as ADFS) for web stuff.

For most other things Kerberos (via PKINIT) is used.

SSH authentication X.509 using PKIXSSH is rarely used since it is not a standard part of any operating systems used. For SSH, typically either Kerberos or SSH keys based on the RSA keys used by the certificates.